SAN FRANCISCO & BERLIN—(BUSINESS WIRE)—March 26, 2009—
mental images®, a global leader in rendering software and visualization
tools for animators, visual effects artists and professionals who create
high quality imagery, today announced that mental ray® 3.7+, the
photorealistic rendering software that now utilizes MetaSL™ universal
shader language to easily and efficiently create and deploy shaders
across platforms, will be integrated into Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 software.

Utilizing the MetaSL universal shader language, mental ray 3.7+
rendering software allows artists to develop shaders that run on all
popular software and hardware platforms. In addition, artists do not
need to re-architect shaders every time there is an advancement in new
generation software, GPU or CPU based rendering systems. MetaSL-based
shaders adapt to fit current and future target platforms.

“mental ray has long been known as the industry standard in rendering.
The native support of MetaSL in mental ray 3.7+ provides for a better
workflow for shader creation and look development in tools such as
Autodesk 3ds Max 2010,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO, mental images.
“Autodesk shares our commitment to providing revolutionary design tools
for visual effects and design visualization artists and we look forward
to further incorporating MetaSL in additional Autodesk products.”

mental ray rendering software is known for a number of enhanced features
designed to make it the fastest, most customizable and extensible ray
tracing engine yet. In addition to the robust, fully parallelized
rendering core for high performance, mental ray comes with a built-in
scene database and memory management to handle extremely large amounts
of data. Artists can create beautiful, physically correct lighting
simulations through a complete set of global illumination algorithms and
the software offers optimized support of visual effects including motion
blur and displacement. Artists also have virtually unlimited
customization options through shaders and plug-ins. mental ray supports
all common geometry types and it includes unique sampling techniques to
achieve the desired quality of images in less time.

“The anticipated integration of mental ray 3.7+ and the MetaSL shader
system into 3ds Max 2010 software will give us a unique advantage,” saysKen Pimentel, director of 3ds Max product management at Autodesk.
“For the first time, customers will have a unified hardware/software
shading workflow and render-quality viewports. The WYSIWYG viewport
experience will enable users to spend more time on iterating creatively
and less time waiting for rendering results.”

mental ray rendering software has an installed base of more than ten
million worldwide and is used for a wide range of industry applications
including the creation of state of the art visual effects for video
games, movies, feature animations, visualization of automotive,
aerospace virtual modeling needs, and architectural design.

The mental mill® Artist Edition software, made by mental images, will
also be bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max 2010. It will provide direct
workflow to users by allowing them to natively render MetaSL based
shaders in 3ds Max 2010 using its library of existing nodes.

mental ray® 3.7+ Performance Features and Benefits

Native MetaSL Shader Support:

MetaSL language to be used for CPU and GPU rendering

Unifies shader languages to simplify and standardize the creation and
deployment of shaders within and across various projects

Progressive Rendering:

Offers early visual results for immediate feedback, at any desired image
quality

The lower number of hair segments result in reduced memory consumption
and increase rendering speed.

About mental images: mental images®, founded in 1986, is the
recognized international leader in providing component and platform
software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content.
Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the
entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific
visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images
primarily as part of their software products and application services.
mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation with
headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States,
mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental
images Pty. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified
engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the
area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies.
For more information, visit
www.mentalimages.com.